Already a swarm of orders for Stieg Larsson's 'Hornet's Nest'. By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY

Already a swarm of orders for Stieg Larsson's 'Hornet's Nest'

By Carol Memmott,  USA TODAY

     A novel racking up huge pre-order sales online is not your typical commercial fiction title — it's a dark thriller translated from Swedish.

     Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, out May 25, is the No. 2 pre-order on Amazon and No. 11 at Barnesandnoble.com. It has topped both pre-order lists in recent weeks.

     Hornet's Nest is the third book in Larsson's posthumous Millennium Trilogy, following stellar sales of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire, Books 1 and 2.

     "The girl" in the series is Lisbeth Salander, a troubled savant/genius computer hacker who teams up with investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist in Tattoo to solve the decades-old disappearance of a teenage girl. In Fire, new and old enemies are trying to kill Salander. In Hornet's Nest, she's recovering from injuries and must stand trial for three murders.

     Fans are so impatient for the final volume that some are ordering copies from the United Kingdom, where it was published last fall.

     "It's really a testament to the cleverness of these books that so many people are frantic for it," says Gillian Lay of New York, who ordered a copy of the U.K. edition from Amazon and bought a second at Partners & Crime, a New York bookstore that offers the U.K. edition for $45.

     (Amazon pre-order price for the U.S. edition is $11.50. Barnes & Noble's is $14.55. List price will be $26.95.)

     Publisher Knopf has announced a first printing of 500,000 for Hornet's Nest, which is spectacular for any novel, much less one by an author who until 18 months ago was virtually unknown in the United States. Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004. He was 50.

     "The numbers on Larsson are staggering," says Paul Bogaards of Knopf. Over the past four years, an estimated 26 million copies of Larsson's books have sold worldwide. Nearly 2.4 million copies of Dragon Tattoo and Fire have sold in the USA since Tattoo's publication in 2008.

     The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has reached as high as No. 10 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list. It's now No. 20. Fire has risen as high as No. 12. It's now No. 70.

     Adding flames to the fire: The Swedish film version of Tattoo with English subtitles will open in limited released in the USA in March.

     And Nordic noir fever is spreading:

• Henning Mankell’s The Man From Beijing (Knopf) arrives this month. The Swedish writer's Kurt Wallander novels got a boost from the recent BBC series Wallander with Kenneth Branagh.

•Norwegian Jo Nesbo's The Devil's Star (Harper) hits stores in March.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2010-02-23-larsson23_ST_N.htm?csp=obinsite